Not exactly the voice inside your head

The not so discreet charm of the literati

A few years ago I got into an argument of historic proportions over H. Rider Haggard. To call what was inflicted on me verbal abuse would grossly underestimate the level of this argument. The fact that it was over a difference of opinion over that pulp writer made no difference.

It therefore comes as completely no surprise that the following quotes have come from a controversy over the awarding of the latest Nobel prize for literature. First the background:

Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.

Let the games begin:

“Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States,”

U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.

“You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

You got to admit, he’s good at this.

“And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola.”

Yet someone wisely points out that perhaps Europeans stack the decks much in the same way they do with European soccer. Patrick Vieira anyone? (Thank you Jake.) The response:

“Very many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe, because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death,” he said. “It is dangerous to be an author in big parts of Asia and Africa.”